Sixth form work

Karen Hans, School Librarian in a London school, talks about her induction work with sixth form:

During our year 12 induction we give each student a USB pre-loaded with useful information and resources such as careers / university websites, finance and time-management tools. As well as providing journals, books and other physical resources we invest in online subscriptions and also point students towards resources provided by others, for example INTUTE; our local libraries personal members’ online subscriptions; our local university’s scheme for 6th form access to books and online resources and, being in London, the resources of the British Library. We educate students about the importance of scholarly sources, of good referencing / anti-plagiarism habits and it is a pleasure to be involved in the new extended project qualification where students undertake a piece of individual research. We also try to engage students in debating issues and meeting expert speakers and authors via our Heritage Group.

Sue Bastone, from Licensed Victuallers’ School, writes about her sixth form induction work

Each Year 12 student at LVS has a compulsory induction session in the LRC. It is only half an hour but we can deliver what we need to and it is followed up by longer sessions in subject lessons to deliver more in-depth topics such as referencing, plagiarism etc.

The induction session concentrates on stressing the importance of independent study skills in preparation for university. We have a 5 minute exercise to see what the students remember about using the library. We then share the answers. This leads into showing our Oliver Home Page which has links to all our online resources. Students are given a bookmark with all the online passwords.

We also give each Year 12 student a memory stick (very popular!) which has a pre-loaded folder of study guides and templates, specifically written by the LRC to help with independent learning i.e. how to write bibliographies, copyright and plagiarism, writing guides and more.

I very much like the idea of giving 6th formers usb’s with templates and useful info, brilliant idea. You coudn’t send me the contents please? I would like to show it to our SMT and maybe create something similar for our Sixth Form.

Giving usb’s with onfo and tenplates to Sixth Formers is a brilliant idea! You couldn’t send me your contents too please? I would love to show it to our STM and hopefully develop something similar for our Sixth Form.

I think a list of the contents could be supplied – I will ask Karen Usher, whose school it was. The actual content, of course, will belong to the librarian who developed it, although you may find some useful documents in the Box files to the right of the Heart page.

I will send further information about the contents to Caroline Roche to see how she can best incorporate for anyone to access, but obviously it depends on what would be useful for your particular students and some links back to our VLE so of course would be password protected. The original idea for a USB was from Geoff Dubber on a training course with ideas for supporting 6th form. I thought about the content that we would want (including adapting some of Geoff’s templates for our students – with his permission) and designed a ‘first page’ which the other documents and VLE pages then link to. My job-share partner researched a company to provide the USBs at a price we can afford and they preload the content and put our logo on the sticks.

Hi Karen/ Caroline
We already give our 6th form a CD with the 6th form expectations and prospectus on it so I think I could easily incorporate some resources on to it or get them to upgrade to USB! Thanks for the inspiration!
Katy
MGS

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